


Matteo Learns to Forgive

by AnotherAoife



Category: Druck, Skam - Fandom
Genre: Boys In Love, M/M, buachaillí i ngrá, character study? kind of, no beta we die like men, that means boys in love in irish :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 02:26:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18540418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherAoife/pseuds/AnotherAoife
Summary: The summer Matteo turned fourteen was the worst summer of his life.The summer Matteo turned eighteen was the best summer of his life.The difference is David.





	Matteo Learns to Forgive

The summer Matteo turned fourteen was a bad summer.

Matteo used to go to the pool every day at 10am after burnt toast for breakfast and leave at 5pm to arrive home in time for burnt toast as dinner. He was a good swimmer. The water was quiet and the water was soft, everything his home wasn’t. The water wrapped around him like a blanket and rocked him when no one else would.

Underwater everything was soft, even Matteo. Matteo wasn’t used to being soft. He was used to bristling edges and cracked glass and spending days with his mother in bed. He was used to spikes and thorns and burned dinners and screaming matches he wasn’t allowed forfeit.

Underwater Matteo floated. He was weightless. He could drag his arm along the pool wall and hold his breath for two minutes and forty-three seconds and no one would tell him he was wrong. Nothing he did here could be wrong because it was soft here. There was no falling, there was no slipping, there was no sharpness. There was just deep breaths and recycled oxygen and a clock ticking down inside his lungs.

Two minutes and forty-three seconds of him, alone. Matteo loved being alone. It was just him and his hand tilting the light and his fingers folding their skin closer together and the bubbles he made until the time was up. Then he’d burst up, coughing and spluttering, dragging air into his lungs through a chlorine burnt throat. Thirty seconds to breathe, and then back under. To the softness. Underwater he felt like he was in a cloud.

He scared the lifeguard once. He stayed underwater with his eyes closed and counted to two hundred and eighty-three. The lifeguard jumped in to help but all she did was shatter the quiet. She brought worry and panic and other fragmented pieces of the poolside that Matteo didn’t want near him, not in the quiet.

She cried because she thought Matteo had died. Matteo looked at her like she was insane.

“I was holding my breath” is the only explanation she gets. The next day Matteo comes to the pool there’s a new lifeguard. He’s a teenage boy and he has pretty eyes. Matteo doesn’t know why that’ a thing he noticed.

When Matteo is thirteen his mother goes off her meds for the first time. That same month his mother goes with him to the pool for the first time in a long time. He thinks it’s so she can swim with him in the softness. He wants to show her how to be safe, like he is. Like the water is.

She keeps his head underwater until the softness is suffocating and the quiet is a bad thing. No one can hear him screaming. The lifeguard has to drag her off him. He gets sick in the bathroom and doesn’t know what hurts more, the chlorine in his eyes or the noise all around him.

Matteo doesn’t go to the pool anymore. The water is no longer safe. He no longer enjoys being alone.

Jonas spent the first month of that summer in Italy. Matteo’s dad said he was going to spend the last month of that summer in Italy. Jonas comes back as his dad leaves. His dad does not come back.

Matteo considers it a trade. He can have one or the other, Jonas or his dad. It’s not a difficult choice to make. Matteo figures when Jonas leaves his father will come back. He couldn’t want anything less.

He does everything he can to make Jonas stay. He just needs one person to stay. He knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he wants someone to stay with him and not ask for his everything in return.

Matteo can feel his bones shifting underneath his skin when he moves. He can hear the blood in his veins and the air in his lungs. He can feel his joints grinding. Matteo tries to stop moving. He tries to become a statue, let everything walk away from him. Tries to be at peace. He tries, christ he tries, but he gets pins and needles in his foot. Being a statue is too lonely.

Matteo takes care of his mother now, but she doesn’t want him to. He picks up her prescription every week. She never takes it.

She says it makes everything seems like she’s underwater. She says it softens everything until she can barely make out the shapes. She says she tried her best to show Matteo, that day in the pool.

Matteo stops picking up her prescription.

Jonas introduces him to new people. He doesn’t get their names. All he can think is this is it. He had seven years with Jonas, but this is it. He’s finally leaving. Matteo couldn’t make him stay.

Jonas does not leave. He remembers the two new boys names.

Abdi and Carlos are funny and kind but Matteo doesn’t know if he has enough left in him to try and make two more people stay.

Matteo gets angry at his mother. He screams at her to do something. He just wants her to fucking care about him. She tells him if he ever yells at her again she will commit suicide because she cannot handle him being mad at her.

Matteo rings his father every day for the first week he’s gone. He does not answer.

Jonas, Carlos and Abdi make a group chat on Snapchat. They name it “ok.cool” because Carlos told them it was a funny name. The notifications make Matteo feel like his house isn’t the only place left on earth. Matteo is starting to hate being alone even more.

Matteo’s father tries to skype him once. Matteo throws the family laptop out the window. His mother says he’s just like her. The laptops breaks and can’t be fixed. It had all of the Florenzi family photos on it. Matteo realises he’s smashed all the videos of his childhood. He can’t bring himself to care. He goes to Jonas’s house. Abdi and Carlos are there. Matteo realises they’re staying. How could he be so stupid, of course they’re staying. How could anyone leave Jonas?

He tells them what he did and then he cries. Abdi tells him his family has a spare laptop they were going to sell, but he can give it to Matteo for free. Matteo doesn’t accept it but he doesn’t forget. He wishes Abdi and Carlos would stay for him too.

Matteo kisses a girl and feels nothing.

A girl kisses Matteo and he feels his mother’s hand holding him underwater, but he can’t thrash or kick or scream this time.

Matteo goes home and cries. He thinks there is something wrong with him.

Jonas’s mother tells Matteo he’s welcome in her home anytime. Her home is warm and loud and colourful and everything Matteo’s isn’t. Matteo wants to stay, God he wants to stay. Instead, he says his mother is expecting him at home. Jonas’s mother smiles at him and gives him a sandwich to take with him. She thinks he is too skinny.

She hugs Matteo as he leaves. It’s the first hug he’s had in eight months. He can’t let go.

When Matteo shuts his bedroom door behind him he can’t make himself stop crying. He wants to live in a house of colour and food and love. Instead, he’s living in a room with grey walls and broken blinds and thin walls that make him listen to his mother sobbing at three in the morning.

Carlos invites Matteo to go swimming with him. Matteo asks if instead they could go to the park. Carlos thinks if he says no Matteo might crumble to pieces in front of him. Carlos and him go to the park every Tuesday after that. On Tuesdays, Matteo is not alone.

Matteo’s mother doesn’t eat anything for four days. Matteo can’t make her eat anything and he doesn’t know what to do. He does hours of research and eventually tries to make her his own linguine. It doesn’t go well.

He phones his father to ask what he did wrong. It goes to voicemail. He does more research and realises he was using too much flour. He tries again.

His mother loves it.

Suddenly, Matteo is making pasta for two every night and learning how to forgive his mother for what she hasn’t done. Sometimes it’s pasta for three when Jonas comes over. Some rare, sweet times it’s pasta for five and his mother comes out of her room to eat with him and his friends.

They’re evicted. He files for his mother’s disability payments because she can’t. They get a two bedroom apartment in the same district as their house was. He figures this will be what makes Jonas leave and take Abdi and Carlos with him. There’s no point in being his friend if they’re not living on the same street. He has nothing to offer.

He can’t make anyone stay.

Jonas, Abdi and Carlos cycle to Matteo’s new place.

Matteo doesn’t have a bike but he has a skateboard. Jonas gets one too so they can be the same. They go to the skatepark every day and learn how to make girls think they’re cooler than they are. Matteo sees a boy do a dolphin kick. He thinks he’d like to talk to him but he doesn’t quite know why. Then a girl kisses the boy. Matteo doesn’t understand why it makes his knees hurt and his joints creak and his throat burn.

Matteo spends his nights alone in his room reading ahead in the schoolbooks he bought himself for next year.

Matteo’s mother tells him she wants to die. He swears he’ll never forgive her for doing this to him, for making him listen. All she does is cry.

On Matteo’s birthday he sits by the phone for hours, waiting for his father to call. No one calls. Matteo never tells his friends his birthday. He doesn’t want to be disappointed again.

Matteo’s mother hauls herself out of bed and drags herself around the kitchen. Two hours later she presents Matteo with a slightly underdone queen cake. She puts a match on top and lights it. Matteo blows it out before it can burn his hand. She smiles at him and goes back to bed. Matteo is alone again, but he wants so badly to love her.

His father calls back. Matteo asks him what to do, how to get his mother back to how she was last summer.

Last summer she took him to the beach whenever he asked. She tried on silly sunglasses and tried to make ice cream in their kitchen and bought wigs for her and Matteo to play dress up. The older Matteo gets the less he remembers. He remembers the sandcastles and the flowers, but there’s more that he can’t forget.

He can’t forget it getting worse. He can’t forget the pills he found in the bin or the knives that went missing or the night his mother hid in his wardrobe to protect him from the men she said we're coming to take him.

He can’t forget the tears or the months she played The Wizard of Oz on repeat looking for clues. She wanted to make it to Oz. She didn’t want to take Matteo with her.

Matteo’s father says leave. He says Matteo’s mother doesn’t care enough about him to try and get better, so why should he stay to try and make her. Matteo turns to ice and tells him to pay his child support bills. He doesn’t mention that he forgot Matteo’s birthday.

They do not speak on the phone again.

On the last night of summer Matteo realises he wants to kiss Jonas. He thinks it will feel like swimming in the sea and climbing up a tall tree. He never tries to find out.

Matteo starts to plan his escape. He looks at apartment listings near his new school and makes himself budgets and considers how much money he could squeeze out of his father monthly.  

He can’t remember the last time someone said they love him.

 

* * *

 

 

The summer Matteo turned eighteen was the start of so many best summers.

The night they find out that they all pass their Abi's David kisses him. It’s not the first time and it’s not the last time but Matteo nearly cries with his love for this boy, this boy. David grins into the kiss and screams with joy into the city the second he takes his lips away. Sam and Kiki scream with him. Matteo thinks of how not quiet it is. Matteo doesn't remember why he loved the quiet so much.

Matteo still goes to see his mother. He makes her pasta every second Thursday and tells her how sorry he is. Matteo loves his mother so much, but his father was right. She didn’t love him enough to even try and get better. She learns to knit and makes Matteo a scarf woven from every colour in the rainbow. Matteo tries harder to forgive her.

Jonas and David join a soccer team. Matteo and Hanna are their biggest fans. They turn up to every match and know every player’s name and number. Abdi and Carlos join three weeks later. Kiki and Sam come with them to the stands. It makes Wednesdays bright days. The one day Kiki can’t come Carlos gets a ball directly into his face. His nose cracks and blood falls scarlet onto the artificial grass.

Matteo is the one who tells Kiki her boyfriend went to the hospital. He emerges with a broken nose and a mild concussion. For his one night stay, they only let family in his hospital room. Carlos says Matteo is his brother. Matteo realises he loves that idiot and Carlos loves him back just as fierce.

The girls start their own soccer team. They get on the local news. Matteo thinks he loves all of them. Matteo keeps finding more love inside himself. He’s had it swirling around his organs his entire life. Now he’s letting it out.

A man on the street punches David in the face after he kisses Matteo. In his mind, Matteo nearly claws the man’s eyes out. In reality, he stays frozen on the spot and Mia decks the man so hard he ends up in the same bed Carlos was, except the man is handcuffed. Matteo tells David five hundred times that he’s sorry. David tells him five hundred and one times that it’s not his fault. David doesn’t press charges. They keep kissing on the street.

Matteo’s mother tells him every time she sees him how hard she’s trying. Matteo tries to believe her.

Jonas forgot how to skateboard. Matteo has to re-teach him. David stays with his two feet planted firmly on the ground. Matteo thinks that if he keeps the people he has now in his life for a while longer, he’ll be okay. He wants them to stay. He’s starting to think they might.

Matteo meets David’s friends, the ones from his old school. They’re hilarious and kind and spontaneous and fun. They’re the exact kind of people Matteo thinks David would hang out with. He can’t for the life of him figure out why David hasn’t left yet when people like that want to be around him.

He asks one night, when it’s dark and quiet. It hides him. He can say anything here and it will never come back. Nothing comes back from the dark and the quiet will protect him. He asks David why he hasn’t left. David tells Matteo everything he loves about him from between his toes to the tiniest corner of his mind. He says that Matteo didn’t deserve to be left alone.

Then he says it again. He says it over and over like an absolution and Matteo can hear the walls inside him built by years of isolation cracking. He whispers into the darkness, asking David to tell him one more time. David never stops saying it.

Jonas’s mother invites Matteo over for dinner once a week. One night Matteo asks if she’d like to meet his boyfriend David. It’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever done. There’s no reason for her to accept him. He’s not family. She’s not obligated to tolerate him.

She says she’d love to meet him and asks what his favourite dinner is. Jonas grins at him from across the table. Matteo realises he’s tired of hating himself.

Matteo introduces his mother to David. She cleans her apartment and makes them a pizza from the box. It’s more than Matteo knew she was capable of. David goes to the bathroom and she tells Matteo she thinks he lovely. Matteo cries and makes David leave before dinner is done. He thinks his father might have been wrong about her. Maybe it wasn’t her fault.

Jonas asks Matteo how he is and for once Matteo tells him the god honest truth. It’s up and down, but he’s been doing better than ever. Matteo tells Jonas he loves him. Jonas says it back. It is more than enough. Jonas is his family.

Matteo is diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. He tells the doctors they’re years too late. His request for a consultation had been sent in when he was fifteen.

They prescribe him pills anyway. He takes them home with him, just in case.

Matteo tells David he’s never climbed a tree. David gets him on a train and within two hours he’s clawing his way up a spruce tree in the middle of the woods. David says he grew up an hour away. Matteo doesn’t ask to see where and David loves him for it.

Every time Hanna sees Matteo she hugs him. Matteo hugs her back harder. He doesn’t know what he did to deserve people like Hannah in his life, but he’s starting to believe he really does deserve them.

David knows how to do a backflip. Matteo finds out one day while he’s hanging out with David’s friends and him in the park. One of them shows Matteo a picture of David doing the splits. Matteo is beyond shocked. David stands up and just does it. His entire body just flips. Matteo thinks he wants to marry this boy someday.

Matteo’s mother goes back on her medication. Matteo knows he should be celebrating but instead he sees red. He is anger and fire and hatred and sorrow rolled into one. She could only pull herself together after he left. What was it about him that stopped her from wanting to get better.

He tells Carlos before anyone else. Carlos reminds him to be compassionate. He goes to Matteo’s mother’s apartment with him. Matteo’s mother says she is sorry. Matteo leaves Carlos sitting across from her with a cup of tea and slams the door behind him. He sees red again.

Carlos talks him through it. Talks him through, the anger and the hatred and the sorrow. He goes back alone and tells his mother he’s sorry too. She makes him linguine. It’s not good. She asks him to teach her. He cries into his pasta. Together, they get better.

Matteo relearns how to believe he is worth something. David tells him every day that he is loved, that he is not alone, that he deserves to be surrounded by people who stay. Matteo starts to say it to himself.

Amira helps Matteo decide what to do with his life. He doesn’t want to be like the rest of his family. Together, they decide Matteo’s best choice is engineering. Matteo doesn't’ think he can do it. His friends know he can.

Matteo starts asking people why they haven’t left. It starts with David at two in the morning. How did he get a man like this to stay? David looks at him like he put the stars in the sky, and then he cries.

On Matteo’s eighteenth birthday Abdi organises a small get together of everyone Matteo loves. Within two hours it’s turned into a rager. Matteo finally tells Abdi that he thinks they’re brothers. Abdi tells him he had thought that since they were fifteen.

Matteo’s friends become his family. Together they go to a Sam Smith concert. When the song ‘HIM’ plays Matteo cries.

Matteo’s father calls. Matteo answers just to ask him to not call again. He hangs up before there’s a reply. Hans and David grin.

Matteo paints his walls, or at least he tries to. He starts to paint one wall yellow but soon Linn has to teach him. Once they’re done one wall is yellow, one bright blue, one light grey and one forest green. They paint Linn’s room next. All of her walls become drenched in sunshine yellow. Linn and Matteo sit together in the centre of her floor and swear that this time next year they won’t be the same.

They both want to learn to love themselves.

Matteo gets a job as a lifeguard. He watches every single head and counts how long they can stay underwater. He doesn’t need to swim to survive anymore. He has safety and comfort and warmth inside himself. It runs through his veins in the place of blood. And when he is cut, he bleeds forgiveness.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so happy you read this! i was reading so so many banging druck fics that were so artsy i decided to try one outside my comfort zone  
> please comment  
> i do not even care if your comment is about the fic. tell me about your day. tell me about your dog. tell me about how you learned to forgive. 
> 
> i want to know!
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @aoifeanamadan it means aoife the idiot in irish. there's meant to be a fada in amadán but tumblr urls dont alow fadas. im considering a lawsuit ngl


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